Cupboard Door Folding Desk

Materials: APPLAD kitchen doors, VIKA legs

Description: I needed a decent desk – I work from home 1 day a week. We don’t have space for a full-time piece of furniture, we needed something we could fold away, as this room gets used for guests, and it’s pretty tiny!

This corner was ideal, but has an awkward wall cutting across at 45 degrees, so I needed to custom-build something.

I ended up building the whole thing out of Ikea kitchen cupboard doors (APPLA D, I think).

They are inexpensive, strong, easy to work, come in a handy range of sizes, and had the nice satin white finish I wanted.

As a bonus, I could use the hinge mechanism in a traditional (cupboard) and non-traditional (desk top) way.

I fixed some batten to the wall using proper fixings, then used simple L-brackets to build the cupboard from that.

The main desktop is a single cupboard door with its hinges fixed to a batten on the wall.

When in use, one edge rests on an edge of the cupboard, which was built non-flush for this purpose.

The other corner rests on a cut-down Ikea Vika Adils leg, which is fixed to an offcut, attached to the underside of the desktop with piano hinge. This means the leg swings out of the way against the wall as you fold the desk up.

The monitor is on a two-piece arm, so can be swung out into a comfortable viewing position when in use, and pushed back over the cupboard when not.

Ikea also provided the port for neatly passing the wires through to the cupboard underneath, as well as the drill attachment for cutting the hole.

An old Apple wireless keyboard and a white wireless mouse are easily stashed in the cupboard at the end of the day.

It’s super-easy to use, works really well as a desk, takes up next-to no space when not in use, and wasn’t that tricky to build.

I didn’t keep track of the cost, but I think it was around £200, including a Ikea Vilgot chair.

Folding the desk away also stops mess building up on it, and keeps it clear an clean as a great working environment.

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